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When Apple announced its new HomeKit SDK at WWDC on Monday, it mentioned Philips, the maker of those popular iOS-connected lights, and potential to use Siri and a command like “Get ready for bed” to automate tasks like closing the garage door, locking the front door, and lowing the lights.

It also announced a new way for developers to build widgets for Notification Center using a new extensions feature for developers, and Philips has already previewed a prototype of what their offering could look like for them with their Hue lights.

The result shown below is a pretty exciting preview of what’s to come when iOS 8 is ready this fall and even more developers have had time to take advantage of the new functionalities possible with iOS 8.

Shouldn’t this sort of functionality be in the control center rather than notification center? Overall the feeling of iOS 8 Beta is that Jony Ive created a beautiful interface last year for iOS but now they are re-cluttering it up without really thinking it through.

Am I the only one who dislikes Apple jamming widgets into the notifications section? Why not give us 3 tabs again and have a dedicated widgets section. What does changing lights, or using a calculator (as seen in Yosemite) have to do with “Today”?

Good question. But I think it’ll work out, you can always arrange those items which you use much less often towards the bottom, and just ignore the fact that “Today” isn’t the best section name for a place where a lights widget sits. Today would be pretty short without widgets, I mean, the today calendar view thing is technically a widget already, and so are the stocks, and the weather, and travel time. Really, everything in Today is already a widget technically, isn’t it?? Perhaps calling it TODAY was actually the wrong decision and there should be two sections in the pull down, WIDGETS — NOTIFICATIONS.
Whatever, it’s just a word.

I do think having widgets in the pull down is the best implementation for widgets (if you want them) though, so this is still great. Reason being, it’s the place you can get to from anywhere at anytime, within an app or not. Widgets on the other two mobile platforms primarily sit on the home screen, which is not glanceable while in an app, so therefore inferior for the purpose of what widgets are supposed to do for you in the first place. In other words, if I have to go to a specific place (home screen), leave my app, and then go back to my app, to check a widget (like on WP live tiles or most Android widgets), I might as well just go to the actual app the widget is representing.